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A few days ago we started a new campaign on SUMO, the Army of Awesome. It’s an effort to allow casual Firefox users to get in contact with other Firefox users who have something to say about Firefox, positive or negative. There is a back story to this project. We at SUMO started a similar campaign earlier this year and launched it after some initial testing. Our focus was on answering as many help requests as possible and we used Cotweet to coordinate our efforts with our core contributors and new volunteers could use their own account and the #fxhelp hashtag so we could track their contributions. That worked fairly well for a while. But in the end it was too inclusive with the Cotweet account being the main tool, and surprisingly enough looking at long rows of only negative feedback turned out not to be really motivating, but we have been doing it since then with new contributors joining from time to time.

A little later the engagement team also started to experiment with Twitter. They also went for the cotweet approach, but answered all kinds of Tweets instead of just the ones relevant for support. That worked much better, but since the engagement team is not the support team they couldn’t answer all the different kinds of support requests on Twitter, and also: we have up to 10.000 Tweets about Firefox a day, it’s impossible for a small team to really answer all those teams, so apparently cotweet wasn’t the correct answer here either.

So a few weeks ago the SUMO team and the engagement team came together to evaluate their own programs and see if we could come up with something better together. We then quickly decided that we’d need an open approach. Much broad in reach than what we had with cotweet. And we decided early on that our help would not be reduced to support tweets but that those would be an important part.

So we began sketching out a micro site that would allow casual Firefox users to skim a stream of Tweets about Firefox, pick one that they wanted to reply to and offer them an easy way to reply by giving them pre-written snippets that they could modify. With a lot of hard work from William Reynolds and the awesome Webdev team we had the basics for the page done pretty quickly.

From our experience within SUMO we knew that support on Twitter quickly evolves into a back and forth and Twitter is not the best tool for discussions. So we wanted to come up with a way for casual contributors to select a pre-written tweet with a link to a support article, and send it to a Firefox users in need of help, but with the good feeling that the tweet would most definitely solve the users problem.

We knew from earlier testing that those were the top support related tweets on Twitter, and we wanted to create articles that would specifically target them, so we could send one tweet in reply instead of having to enter a rather difficult support discussion in 140 characters.

A few days ago all of this came together now and works just great on the Army of Awesome. One user called the experience ‘addictive’. Go check it out 🙂

Last weekend we had a fantastic event in Skopje that brought together almost the whole Balkan in Macedonia. Together with David Tenser we were there to learn more about our community and present SUMO and our big rewrite. Later we had the chance to talk to the bigger audience about the role of support within Mozilla and what it means to support 400 million users. Mapping names to faces after chatting online for some time is always nice and there was plenty of chance for that as well.

I like to think that the Balkans event was as fun as it was productive. For us it’s important to reach as many people in their native language as possible, especially with support and that’s a goal we share with our localizers. We already had locale leaders for half of the languages spoken in the Balkan region, big thanks to Aleksandar, Edo, Milos and smo; and we added 3 more with Bulgarian, Greek and Mazedonian, another big thanks to Emil, Martin, Pierros, Contanton and Gorjan. This event was a first in that the locale communities set goals for themselves to track their progress. There we didn’t but here I pledge that I’ll try everything I can to help the locale communities to bring support to people in their native language. And hopefully we will have localized support for the top 20 articles in every language spoken in the Balkans by the end of the year 🙂

And a huge thanks to William and especially Gorjan (who is 17!), for making the Balkans meeting such an amazing event!

Patricia was so kind to translate this into Belorussian. How cool is that?! Check it out here:Belorussian by PC

So, are Americans different from Germans? Or from dutch, or from Brazilians? Okay, they probably are to some point, but the question for the SUMO team is: do Americans have the same questions about Firefox as Germans or Spanish or any other language group? Currently we do assume that, but we didn’t actually back that up with data. The process of doing so is quite tedious, but we have 300 articles in our knowledge base and if it turns out that the top 20 articles in Spanish are different from the top 20 articles in English our localizers can make much better decisions about which article to localize or work on next. Ideally we would send out weekly rankings to our localizers and we will hopefully be able do so with Kitsune, the new KB project, in the meantime however we are working on making sense of the data we have and we will share that with localizers soon.

If you are a localizer and want to know about the popularity of an article, just ask in our contributor forums, I’ll try to come up with an answer quickly.

I started as the Support Community Manager at Mozilla two weeks ago and I thought it would be a good idea to share my view of Mozilla and support, so you can see where my enthusiasm comes from 🙂

Firefox is used by around 350 million people all over the world. There aren’t many commercial applications that can claim that and I don’t know of any free and open source software that has a userbase even close to that. And what is even more amazing: Almost all of our user have chosen our product over another one. Almost all of them already had a browser on their system and still did download our software.

But even more amazing: We are competing with Apple, Google and Microsoft, the biggest IT companies in the world. Having even only one of them as a competitor is crazy, but we are competing with ALL of them and we don’t have a real advertising budget. In fact our whole income is not even close to the marketing budget of even one of our competitors. And what is even more amazing: Not only are we able to compete with them, but we even do better than them. People are choosing us actively over Apple’s pre-installed Safari and Microsoft’s pre-installed Internet Explorer.

While this is all … well … amazing 😉 it also puts a lot of responsibility on us. A great mind once said: “With great power comes great responsibility”. A quarter of the Internet population trusts us with their data (passwords, browsing history, bookmarks) and their browsing experience. They trust that we will make sure they will never ever lose their data and they trust that we’ll make sure that their browser will just work. Always.

That’s a lot of pressure coming from 350 million people. We work hard, everyday around the clock (benefit of having contributors in almost every time zone) to make sure we meet the expectations of our user. Still, nobody is perfect. In some cases we may have screwed up, after all we have 350 million users on just as many different computers with different operating systems. In other cases someone else may have screwed up and may affect the browsing experience of our users. In a perfect world that would never happen, users would know the manuals by heart and no software would ever be released with any bugs left in it. Well, the world is not perfect, users don’t know all the tricks needed to get the software to do what they want and software, operating systems and applications do have bugs. This is our opportunity to shine. We can’t create a perfect world nor can for example doctors, but like doctors we can help people and heal what is broken.

That is the power of support. We can give people aid in how to prevent problems and we can give them instructions what to do if something goes wrong. Sure we seldom engage in life and death matters, but neither do most dentist or optometrists. I still wouldn’t want to live without them. There are even more parallels if you think about it: nobody want’s to go to a doctor, but everybody is hoping for them to be available should they ever need them.

Unfortunately tech support has a bad reputation. Most organizations see support only as a cost center. But cost centers have to be held down, nobody will praise you for having doubled your expenses for a cost center. That is why people dread tech support and just hope to never have to deal with it. That is both, the giving end and the receiving end. Fortunately though Mozilla sees support as an important part of the project and one more way to be a pioneer for free and open source software. There are not many projects to take cues from on how to offer support for 350 million people, but that makes it all the more challenging. And since it is our goal to offer the best possible support experience in the world, the winners will be all users, not only ours.

today is my first day as the SUMO community manager. I actually do plan to put that on my business card “SUMO community manager”. I guess it will lead to a lot of interesting questions 😉 And that will give me an excuse to tell people about the extraordinary privilege that I have doing just my job.

I have been with Mozilla for more than seven years now. I started as a localizer for Firefox (then m/b or Phoenix) and lead the German Firefox community ever since. A few month ago I applied for the position of the “Support community manager” at Mozilla. After all, managing a support community is what I’ve been doing for several years as a hobby.

I mean that’s the dream of most people, right? Getting payed for something you would do even if nobody happened to pay you. Turning your
hobby into your job. But it’s more than that. Now I don’t have to feel bad for putting so much time into it and I get to extend the scope of my
work, which is just awesome.

While leading the German community I had a lot of time to gain experience in building communities and working with them. I’ll still be
part of the German community, but now I hope to use that experience to work much more closely with the international community on global support issues at Mozilla. Coming from a local community I know the pain points of those communities and my hope is that as part of the SUMO-Team I’ll be able to guide the way to a much more localization- and community-aware SUMO.

So, all in all, I couldn’t have asked for a better situation to be in, I’m grateful everything worked out so perfectly and I’m excited to get
started. Oh, and I have one more blog post about why I think I have one of the best jobs in the world.